Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
118,070 55,160 46.72% 195

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 3116 6122 5 658
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 2276 4384 12 146
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 2174 4553 6 537
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 2133 5003 9 883
21 West Anchorage 1989 4309 4 573
27 Anchorage - Basher 1980 4060 4 406
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 1898 3997 1 386
20 Anchorage - Downtown 1864 3712 4 643
31 Homer/South Kenai 1839 4149 10 9
18 Anchorage - Spenard 1804 3656 15 519
26 Anchorage - Huffman 1749 4256 4 453
16 Anchorage - College Gate 1747 3359 6 349
04 Western Fairbanks 1725 3476 3 671
25 Anchorage - Abbott 1720 3787 5 378
34 Mendenhall Valley 1667 4039 9 1096
35 Sitka/Petersburg 1632 3260 9 15
17 Anchorage - University 1495 3104 1 389
29 North Kenai 1376 3020 3 16
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1327 2751 9 3
23 Anchorage - Taku 1308 2973 7 354
11 Greater Palmer 1285 2654 8 1008
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1271 2398 1 135
12 Chugiak/Gateway 1269 2996 4 576
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1262 2694 5 510
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 1241 2619 3 104
10 Rural Mat-Su 1172 2750 1 553
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1102 2544 5 454
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1031 2117 3 336
15 Elmendorf 1031 2179 7 164
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1022 2174 5 3
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1015 2209 5 667
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1010 2333 3 8
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1002 2137 4 196
07 Greater Wasilla 934 2245 4 845
03 North Pole/Badger 767 1674 2 256
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 706 1486 1 220
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 503 1144 5 9
38 Lower Kuskokwim 290 641 0 5
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 236 520 2 134
40 Arctic 156 533 1 6
99 NA 36 53 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.